Video Night in Kathmandu

by Pico Iyer

  This insistent desire to escape the shadow of Big Brother had begun to haunt every aspect of the game. During my visit, I heard much lamentation about the eclipse of the traditional obento box lunches at baseball games by American fast-food imports—Korakuen, the National Shrine of Baseball, was appointed with a Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet, a Mister Donut store and, of course, the Golden Arches. I read a column in the Japan Times that grimly debated whether foreigners should be admitted to the meikyukai club, the country’s unofficial Hall of Fame, reserved for players with 200 wins or 2,000 hits. The anxiety had even, by now, seeped into the trade war: Washington had persuaded the Japanese to accept U.S.-made aluminum bats, and Japan had accepted, but then had quickly modified its rules so as to make the bats effectively illegal.

  Yet in typically contradictory fashion, the Japanese had also sought to reverse the supremacy of the American leagues by importing American players. And as I followed the major leagues at home, I noticed, every now and then, that a onetime star, now in his early thirties perhaps, and three or four years away from his last All-Star appearance, would suddenly vanish; he was reborn, I gathered, across the Pacific. By now, Don New-combe, Frank Howard, Clete Boyer, Joe Pepitone and a hundred other stars had jumped to Japan. And when I attended my first Giants game, I was startled to see a familiar form standing in front of me in center field. I looked a little closer, and saw that it was Warren Cromartie, who, when last I looked, had been leading the Montreal Expos to one near-pennant after another. Old players didn’t die; they just went to Japan.

  American baseball, of course, takes great pride in its role as a model of the melting pot, a happy community of integration. Black-dominated basketball is often shadowed by the prospect of racism, inverted or otherwise; football coaches still tend to give the most cerebral positions to whites, the most athletic to blacks. But baseball ideally presents a rainbow coalition of Hispanics, blacks and All-American boys, integrated as slaphappily as a prime-time platoon. Willie Mays has become as much a part of the pantheon as Mickey Mantle, while the Minnesota Twins boast a pitcher who last went to bat for Anastasio Somoza’s National Guard. A single small town in the Dominican Republic, San Pedro de Macorís, is the birthplace of fourteen current major-league players.

  In Japan, however, the incorporation of foreign players was an altogether trickier proposition. For one thing, Japanese baseball turned all the values of the American game on their head, imposing on every alien an entirely new set of values. Thus the recently arrived American had to learn to be as obedient and well disciplined as a child. He had to agree not to show off his talent, not to seek out flashy statistics, not, in short, to become a star. He had to recall that unity came from unanimity, that his identity lay only with the team. When one player made an error, all his colleagues hit one another so as to share the responsibility. And strategic decisions were reached, not by the pitcher and catcher alone, but by huge consensus (in the first two innings of a 1-0 game, I saw seven different board meetings on the mound, many of them attended by a full quorum of nine). In Japan, players were nothing more than verses in a single poem.

  In a system in which everyone was everyone else’s peer, moreover, peer pressures were unavoidably intense. Thus gaijin had to submit to fifteen-hour days and backbreaking workouts. Sometimes, they had to live with their fellows in a collective dorm and observe an unyielding 10 p.m. curfew. In the off-season, they had to accompany the team as it toured remote areas to play exhibition games for those who would not otherwise be able to see professionals; almost immediately thereafter, they had to report back to training camp in time for the next season. “In my country,” writes Oh, “it is impossible to play just for oneself. You play for the team, the country, for others.”

  The transplant had also to pledge lifelong loyalty to his squad. In Japan, a baseball team does not represent a city, but a company; team spirit is thus indistinguishable from corporate loyalty. Players in Japan, moreover, are good company men; they do not, as a rule, offer their talents to the highest bidder, or negotiate with owners; their reward is simply the support of the corporate clan (while a World Series winner in 1984 received $50,000, a Japan Series winner made only $2,500). Comfort, in fact, is almost regarded as a handicap. (“He has big salary, he has good family,” a Japanese colleague of mine once complained about a star. “He has no fighting spirit.”) And as with any other Japanese company, the team becomes for its employee family, home and religion (if marriages in Japan often seem like corporate mergers, jobs often resemble surrogate spouses). “I guess [my colleagues] have girlfriends,” said Dennis Barfield, the first American to live in a team dorm, “but I don’t see them.”

  Many onetime American stars were little disposed, however, to check in their individualism at customs. They were accustomed to arguing and bartering and basking in the limelight. They talked back to managers and haggled with owners. They led their own lives and battled with their teammates. They even—and this was heresy in the Japanese game—showed emotion. In Japan, a player smiles when he strikes out and does not try to break up double plays. After every one of his home runs, Oh had circled the bases without a trace of emotion, lest, in exulting, he humiliate his opposition. What, then, could the fans of the Yomiuri Giants be expected to make of such imported stars as Clyde Wright, a fallen California Angel? On being taken out of a 1-1 game one day, as Robert Whiting tells it, Wright did not calmly hand the ball to the Giant manager, the revered Nagashima. Instead, he flung it into the stands, stalked into the dugout, tore up his uniform, threw it into the team bath, kicked over a trash can and threatened to leave Japan—all before 25-million stunned citizens on national television! In panic, the Giant front office instantly laid down a formal series of 10 Commandments which every gaijin was expected to obey. The list made specific the need for obedience, discretion, tidiness and teamwork. (“Do not severely tease your teammates.” “Do not return home during the season.” “Take good care of your uniform.” “Do not scream or yell in the dugout or destroy objects in the clubhouse.”) The only thing the elaborate battery of rules did not address, however, was the most basic problem of all—the reluctance of American players to adhere to rules in the first place.

  Sometimes, Japanese teams tried to solve the problem by simply jettisoning American players who would not play by Japanese rules, while keeping those who would (the Chunichi Dragons recently got rid of the American who was their leading home-run hitter, while hanging on to a less troublesome gaijin who was hitting .190). Yet even that did not get around the most difficult problem of all: that many American imports, however accommodating and acclimatized, were simply too good for the league. Cromartie, for example, had won over many Japanese by graciously giving his newborn child the middle name of “Oh”; yet still the fact remained that every time he came up to the plate, it looked as if he could hit the ball into the next prefecture, almost at will. The first three times I saw him hit, he smashed three solid singles without even appearing to exert himself; over the previous six games, he had hit five home runs. Another American, Boomer Wells, had been virtually pushed out of the Minnesota Twins organization and forced against his will to move to Japan. A failure at home, he had won the Triple Crown in his second season in Japan.

  In 1985, in embarrassing fact, the list of statistical league leaders was a virtual roll call of American names. Randy Bass, who had distinguished himself with all of seven home runs in his first five years in the United States, made mincemeat of the pitchers in Japan’s Central League, hitting a remarkable 54 home runs in a 130-game season, and coasting to the Triple Crown (a feat he repeated the next season too). In the Japan Series, Bass helped the Hanshin Tigers to victory by belting homers in each of the first three games; inevitably, he was voted the Series’ Most Valuable Player. The winning pitcher in two of the three Tiger victories was Rich Gale, in his first season away from the Kansas City Royals. And the star of the Tigers’ opponents, the Seibu Lions, was a former Chicago Cub by the name of Steve Ontive
ros. By 1987, the crisis was becoming even more acute, as Bob Horner, a superstar still in his prime, came over and clouted four home runs in his first two games.

  That the league’s few gaijin so effortlessly dominated the game was a source of abiding unease for the Japanese. The imported stars could, to be sure, be shown off as adornments of the Japanese game; but they were also unpleasant reminders of the apparent superiority of the American game. Thus the Japanese found themselves painfully divided. On the one hand, they did not like gaijin; on the other, they did not like losers (incredibly, almost one fan in every two across the country supports the Yomiuri Giants, the powerhouse that once won nine pennants in a row).

  In the end, then, the Japanese had tried to unriddle the knot with still more regulations, many of them unwritten. The Giants had long made a point of fielding no foreigners at all. For years, no foreigner appeared on the cover of Baseball magazine. And to this day, only two gaijin are allowed on every team (even in the All-Star Game, where, by rights, five or six probably deserve to qualify). Sometimes, however, even rules cannot bend Nature, and the Japanese were driven to acts of quiet desperation. At the end of the ’85 season, Bass came into Tokyo needing only one more home run to tie the all-time single-season record, set by the legendary Oh in his miracle season of 1964. The American’s opponents were the Giants, managed by Oh. The first time Bass came up to the plate, he was intentionally walked. The second time, he was walked again. And the third time too. And yet again the fourth. And four times the next game too. No matter that the play was foul; by taking the bat out of Bass’s hands, the Giants successfully ensured that the record remained safely in Oh’s thoroughly Japanese hands (that Oh was in fact half-Chinese was a fact usually overlooked). “It’s a funny situation when a foreigner is the ace pitcher of the team or the home-run leader,” Whiting quotes the League Commissioner as declaring. “Foreigners, at best, should be by-players to bolster Japanese teams.”

  Foreign players, then, were simultaneously given the red carpet and the cold shoulder. The Japanese flocked to see Bass hit, and he was once rewarded for his skills with a year’s supply of rice; yet nobody wanted him to beat Oh’s record. Within a few days of his arrival, Horner had become a kind of folk hero, and as three TV stations organized “Horner Corner” updates, while a soft drink company asked him to endorse a vegetable drink called “Toughman,” many Japanese spoke fretfully of a dangerous “Horner Syndrome.” Yet as I looked down on Cromartie doffing his cap in center field, as the Korakuen crowd cheered his every move (“Cro mar tei! Cro mar tei!”), and raising his glove to acknowledge their applause after his catching of a routine fly ball, he struck me as a slightly lonely and bewildered figure.

  Off the field, many gaijin found themselves in even more of a gilded cage. Horner, for example, was paid $1.3 million for one year, more than 20 Japanese players might hope to earn, in addition to a $500,000 bonus just for signing; all his living expenses were paid for him, and he and his family were set up in a three-bedroom “mansion” apartment. Many others were given personal interpreters, and chauffeurs to drive them to each game. But there they had to practice—often for six hours each day—with teammates who could not speak their language and did not share their interests. And though they might be feted—waiters at restaurants would often give them free meals, for example—they were also fated never to be accepted as part of Japan. “You read a lot of books,” said Bass in describing his life in Japan. “You can’t talk to anyone. You’ve got nothing to do but sit here and think.” In coming to Japan, the typical American had traded in a cozy mediocrity for the most alienating kind of success.

  THE CONTRADICTIONS that haunted Japan’s uneasy importing of baseball were very similar, I thought, to those that shadowed all the goods and techniques that it had brought over from the West. For even as the Japanese omnivorously cannibalized the world outside, they never appeared to defer to it, or to worry that Japanese integrity might be compromised by the feverish importation. Their willy-nilly consumption of foreign goods seemed less, in fact, an act of homage than a way of making their own land a composite of all that was best in the world. Again, the logic was flawless: if Japan had everything good from the West, together with all its own homegrown virtues, how could anyone surpass it?

  And again, I thought, Tokyo Disneyland was eloquent. For though it was based, down to the last detail, upon its American counterpart, its effect was to serve as a shrine to Japan’s self-validating beliefs, a monument to the motherland. Thus it fed off borrowed images from the Wild West, but domesticated them with its own urban cowboys. It took what is known in American Disneylands as Main Street, and turned it into the World Bazaar, where all the products and all the possibilities of all the continents in the world are brought together in one synthetic complex that was wholly Japanese. In the Meet the World pavilion—a ride not to be found in American Disneylands—a sagacious crane guides a little boy and his kid sister around what is not only a history of Japan but also a defense of the Japanese way. The bird points out a group of cavemen seated around a campfire. “They have learned,” pronounces the Feathered One, “the importance of banding together to survive.” Then it goes on to introduce the children to a samurai. “At least,” boasts the warrior, “we never became a colony.” And in the Magic Journeys ride—again peculiar to Tokyo Disneyland—a whirlwind trip across all five continents culminates, dramatically, in a return to “our beloved Japan, where our heart always remains.”

  Some of that same spirit could be found among Japanese in the United States. When Chinese or Indian or Korean or Vietnamese immigrants move to the Promised Land, they generally lose no time at all in assimilating themselves; they set up shops and set about working, often very hard, in the confident hope that if they work hard enough, they can create a new life for themselves in the land of opportunity, fashion a fresh American destiny. Many Japanese in America, however, were much less conspicuous, and much less American. One third of the Japanese in New York, according to a poll, never read an American periodical; around a half admitted (or boasted?) that they had no American friends at all.

  The Japanese abroad, indeed, whether tourist or expat, often reminded one less of sightseers than of undercover spies, assiduously observing, and even mastering, the ways of an alien land, in order to bring home new assets to the motherland. Instead of mingling with the locals, the Japanese famously traveled in groups (confirming many a Western stereotype, in part perhaps because a stereotype is what they aspire to) and sequestered themselves in specifically Japanese base camps: in Manhattan, they generally forswore the Rainbow Room or the roadside hot-dog stand in favor of transplanted Japanese piano bars, and on their sex tours, salarymen did not hit the streets along with German or Australian or American males, but stayed in special Japanese hotels appointed with Japanese waiters and Japanese-seeming girls. Even their furious clicking away with cameras could sometimes seem a way of capturing a foreign place only in order to take it back home. The Japanese, as John David Morley notes, are unrivaled in their collection of omiyage, or souvenirs. Yet as a Japanese friend explains to Morley, “We take something back home less as a reminder of the place where it was bought than as proof we’d been thinking of home at the place we bought it.”

  In its relations to the world at large, then, Japan reminded me, in the end, of a tribal conqueror who dons the armor, or even eats the heart, of a defeated opponent, so that his enemy’s strength will become his own. Oh’s spiritual breakthrough had come, I recalled, when his teacher took him to another sensei for an explanation of the central Kabuki principle of ma, “the space and/or time in between.” “Make the opponent yours,” declared the sage. “Absorb and incorporate his thinking as your own. Become one with him so you know him perfectly and can be one step ahead of his every movement.” The central notion of ki, or “spirit power,” like the guiding principle of judo, was similarly angled: “Make use of an opponent’s strength and yours will be doubled.”

  IN RECENT YEARS of
course, this strategy had met with astonishing success; Japan had made good, to a remarkable degree, on its determination to beat the West at its own game, be it baseball or technology or trade. While mastering nearly every Western technique, the Japanese had overtaken nearly every Western nation. On the day that I left New York for Tokyo, the cover story of The New York Times Magazine was a long article by Theodore H. White describing the Japanese surrender in 1945, and discussing the country’s almost militaristic drive for success in the intervening forty years. Japan, White implied, had exacted revenge for its defeat in the war by trouncing the West in the trade war. Though America had invented the radio and the black-and-white TV, he noted, it now imported both products from Japan, together with nearly all its VCRs, calculators, watches and even pianos. “Perhaps we did not win the war,” he wrote, with some rancor. “Perhaps the Japanese, unknown even to them, were the winners.”

  A former baseball reporter from Minneapolis made the same point to me, more casually, after attending a game in Koshien. “Jesus!” he marveled. “They’ve out-Americaned America.”

  Yet still the Japanese seemed as unready to accept victory as defeat, as anxious as ever, and as serene. This came home to me most hauntingly when I went to Hiroshima on the fortieth anniversary of the day the American bomb had dropped from the heavens. I arrived at the Peace Park expecting to find the historic occasion marked by huge crowds, lobby groups, placards and policemen. There was none of that. The moment was observed with quintessential Japanese delicacy: it was a day of resounding quietness.

  In the great open space of the park, little girls in bonnets were bending down to feed pigeons. Old men in T-shirts that said “Peace” staggered, foot by twisted foot, toward the shrine. In the shade, a schoolgirl sat under her mother’s parasol, sketching the outline of the famous dome whose skeleton was all that remained after the bombing. Off to one side, in a quiet grove, an old lady who had survived the attack stood before a circle of hushed listeners, describing all that she had experienced. And everywhere, heaped on the Children’s Peace Monument, gathered in boxes, fluttering across the grass, were hundreds upon hundreds of rainbowed banners plaited together in the shape of a many-colored crane. Anyone who tied 1,000 of these streamers together, the Japanese believed, was assured of a long life. The paper that now blanketed the park recalled a little girl who had survived the bombing and managed to tie together 960 colored banners, and then had died.